My paper considers the ways Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout’s 2011 Money Shot explores economics, arguing that the volume links the Great Recession to other recent American cultural trends. Money Shot also links poetic images to commodities in ways that critique traditional modes of understanding poetry’s cultural function. But Armantrout also embraces the opportunities this commodification offers for punning and play, even as her poems express ambivalence about her own poetic success.

Lorine Niedecker asks “intensity—one can spread it in voluptuous gasps over page after page?” Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ multi-volume serial poem Drafts (2013) and the follow-up project Interstices (2014) can be read as a response to Niedecker’s question—which is also a question about the possible limitations of Objectivist poetics. What version of an Objectivist heritage or poetics do we find in DuPlessis’s use of seriality? What forms of continuity and discontinuity?

The difference between the appropriative writing of the 20th century and the present, is that raw text is increasingly seen as uninterpretable. I suggest the implications of contemporary appropriations and their attempt to bypass pastiche, “blank parody,” or indeed to offer any intervention at all.